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Flickr/Gigi Ibrahim. Some rights reserved.On Monday, if you were in Tahrir Square and
didn’t know any better, you might have been forgiven for thinking that 25
January in Egypt marked nothing more than ‘police day’, as it did before 2011.
People handed roses to security forces who filled the Square, long scrubbed
of graffiti. You might have been forgiven for thinking the revolution had never
happened.

Except for Sanaa Seif, recently released
from Sisi’s prisons, a lone reminder walking through Tahrir in the rain, "the
January revolution continues" written on the back of her jacket. As heart breaking
as it was to see that this is all that seems to be left of the millions packed
into the Square demanding justice and freedom, it was a small but clear visual reminder
that there are cracks in the edifice of counter-revolution.

If you have no other reason than this to
read Jack Shenker’s truly astonishing book, The
Egyptians: A Radical Story, it would be enough: to be reminded of the myriad
ways in which the revolution continues, despite the regime’s increasingly desperate
attempts to tell us that it failed, or never happened, or was their idea all
along. To be reminded that there is yet hope and that much of the states’ continued
repression is a manifestation of “the absurdity of power on the brink of
collapse.”

But there are many more reasons to read the
book. It is painstakingly researched, moving, engaging and engaged, the most
articulate and comprehensive account of the revolution I have read to date.
More importantly, as indicated by the title, it is about the Egyptian people,
their daily struggles against injustices great and small. This is revolution as
the organic culmination of these ongoing struggles, a breakthrough in the Egyptian
people’s unfolding attempt to redefine the state, their relationship to it and
to each other; “not a time-bound occurrence, nor a shuffle of rules and faces
up top, but rather a state of mind.”

Shenker, a journalist and writer based in London and Cairo, weaves together a compelling narrative
from the historical and contemporary events, trends, phenomena that went into
creating this mind set. He describes the effects on individuals and communities
of consecutive top-down economic and social reforms, cosmetically different but
predicated on maintaining elite control over resources and patronage networks –
and all enforced with state violence.

From Mohammed Ali to Mubarak, Sadat to Sisi,
those with a monopoly on violence (and those in their favour or whose favour
they court) have wielded it brutally to achieve their goals; torture, paid
thugs, political prison, and disappearances have pockmarked the political
landscape and scarred the bodies and minds of citizens across Egypt. As Shenker
shows us, these patterns of repression are not aberrations, as they are often framed
when acknowledged, but have been part and parcel of Egypt’s ‘modernising’
projects, closely linked to global dynamics.

Time and again they are met with resistance
and resilience, in Kamshish, Sarandu, Mahalla, Qursaya, and Cairo, in the
fields and factories and on fishing boats, on Queen boat and in the Egyptian
Museum. In countless mini-Tahrirs against countless mini-Mubaraks, women,
workers, farmers, Christians, the Bedouin, teenagers, professionals, artists have
worked and fought together to demand and take their rights rather than plead
for favours, to wrest back control over their bodies, resources, beliefs and
ways of life from a paternalistic state, to keep taking one step forward for
every two steps back.

Shenker reminds us ­– repeatedly and patiently because he
knows he is up against a barrage of ‘expert’ mainstream media analysis – that the
real fault lines in Egypt are not religious. Instead, they cut across religion,
age, sex, and background, “horizontal rather than vertical lines” between the
power network and the people, between those who would maintain the old ways and
those fighting for the new.

His excavation of the shared experience and
memory of modern Egypt is broad and deep. As I read I found myself not only
reliving but also learning in great detail about things I had experienced, or
read about, or protested about, or heard about from my parents, that had filtered
into my own political awakening in Egypt, led to my own reasons for being in
Tahrir. As well as being moved to tears several times, I had several “a-ha!”
moments where events that had resonated with me at the time but left no
conscious impression of fitting into a bigger picture became a coherent account
of how and why the tipping point was reached.

There is no pretence at being ‘objective’
here, though the research is thorough, and the facts facts. There is an honest and
refreshing romanticism, a genuine caring for how it turns out, a hoping for
something better that anyone who was in Tahrir over the course of those 18 days
(and later) will recognise, and which made it that much more enjoyable to read.

More than anything else I’ve read on Egypt’s
revolution (I will recommend it to all who have asked me since moving to London
to ‘explain’ the revolution and why it has ‘failed’), it tells the story right.
It makes it clear why, even if it had not been for Khaled Said’s brutal murder,
there would have been another breaking point, another immediate ‘lead up’ to
Tahrir.

Many media outlets, in their coverage of the anniversary of the
revolution, have framed their pieces by asking, “was it worth it?” This book doesn’t
just answer that question – it shows why it is so wrong to ask it in the first
place. The question assumes revolution as a rational choice, a weighing of pros
and cons, rather than a necessary result of often life-and-death struggles. There
could have been no other way and it is not over yet, not just in Egypt but all over
the world.

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